"The Second World War started in Asia with another convenient episode but it too had deeper roots. The Japanese militarists and nationalists were looking to build an empire in Asia to provide raw materials, markets, cheap labour and land for settlement. Japan had already taken the rich Chinese province of Manchuria in 1931 after a series of bombs had conveniently exploded on a Japanese-owned railway line. In 1937 Japanese soldiers were out on regular patrol in Beijing, a right established after a multinational force had defeated the anti-foreign Boxer Rebellion at the end of the nineteenth century. As the patrol neared an ancient bridge in Beijing, said to be the one the Venetian explorer Marco Polo had crossed on his way into the city centuries before, shots apparently rang out. The next day the Japanese produced a body in Japanese uniform. Although rumour in Beijing claimed that the Japanese had simply dressed up a dead Chinese beggar, the Marco Polo Bridge incident became Japan’s justification for invading China south of the Great Wall and occupying a great swathe of the coast down to the border of Hong Kong. That invasion helped to turn American opinion away from isolationism to confrontation."